Her 24-Hour Protector(32)
The parrot squawked again, and thunder rumbled low and close outside. Lex could hear the splat of rain coming down heavily out in the street. A gust of moisture-tinged air chased through the store, and a door somewhere banged upstairs.
Lex cleared his throat. “I didn’t come for a reading, ma’am. Tom McCall told me that you once knew Sara Duncan, a croupier who worked at the old Frontline Casino about thirty years ago.”
Her face remained expressionless, but he detected a shift in her body tension. “What you say your name was?”
“Lex Duncan.”
She stared at him for a long while, and as Lex watched, her features seemed to melt, and her hand went to her neck. “My oath,” she whispered, voice hoarse and low. “You’re her boy.”
Lex’s chest constricted, his mouth going dry. “I…wanted to ask you some questions about Sara, about my mother. Sheriff McCall helped work my mother’s homicide case along with the Reno police all those years ago. He mentioned you had been a friend of my mother’s, that you and her used to work together at Frank Epstein’s Frontline Casino.”
She nodded. “Before it was razed to make way for the Desert Lion. Yes. Yes, I worked there at the same time Sara was there.” She drew the curtain back hastily, hooking it up into a silver loop. She pulled out a chair at a small round table that was draped in midnight-blue velvet. “Sit.” She fluttered her hand full of rings at the chair.
He held up his palms. “I didn’t come for a reading—”
“No, no…you must sit.”
Lex edged awkwardly onto the tiny chair at the little round séance table. The old woman seated herself opposite him, reached over the table, clasped both his hands in hers, her skin papery, dry, her fingers bony. “I can’t believe it,” she whispered. “Sara Duncan’s boy.” Moisture filled her eyes as she considered him intently. “You have her features, you know? And the color of your eyes, it’s the same green as hers. Sara, she turned the head of many a man…you’ve come looking for your father.”
Lex shook the chill she gave him. It would be obvious that he’d be looking. “Yes,” he said.
Always, he was looking.
She narrowed her eyes. “But mostly you want the man who killed your mother.”
He said nothing.
She sighed heavily. “Son, you’re seeking a past in a city that holds no memory. Not only that but there are still people in this town who will go to great lengths to ensure that the past stays where it belongs—buried.” She leaned forward, bony fingers tightening around his. “You go trying to mess with that, and you’re looking to be messing with some real bad ghosts.”
“I’m looking for truth. Not ghosts.”
She shook her head. “Honey, what you’re looking for is trouble.”
Lex heard the storefront bells tinkle suddenly, as if someone had entered the store. He couldn’t see the door from where he was sitting—he was tucked behind the curtain. Besides, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the woman’s strange, lined face. Probably just another gust from the storm, he told himself. The bells blew again in the wind. Thunder clapped right overhead. Candles shimmered, sputtered in wax. His pulse quickened. “What are you trying to tell me?” he said quietly.
She closed her eyes, began to rock backward and forward, her voice taking on a strange and dissonant monotone. “A past…buried in the Mojave sands. Sands of time…a grave…”
“What exactly are you saying?”
She rocked some more. Then her eyes suddenly flared open. “Bodies!” she hissed.
Tension wedged into Lex’s throat. “Look, I didn’t want any reading. I just wanted to ask you some questions about my mother.”
Her eyes refocused on him. “People used to bury bodies out there, in the desert, you know? Before the feds ran them out of town.”
People? Feds? Was she alluding to the fact he was a federal agent, or was she referring to Las Vegas’s dark mob past? Lex thought of the fat envelope of cash that used to arrive for his mother, delivered by a guy in a shiny blue Cadillac convertible. “Are you trying to say my mother might have been involved with organized crime?”
“Everyone—” she whispered “—was touched by those tendrils of evil. Everyone.”
Lex grew agitated. He didn’t believe in this woo woo crap, yet this woman was managing to rattle his cage nevertheless. He tried to get back on track. “Did Frank Epstein ever mess with my mother, while she was working there?”
She shook her head. “Don’t even go thinking about it. Epstein is not your father. He used to bed a different woman every night, but once he met his Mercedes, then a showgirl from the Flamingo Club, his whole world changed. From the moment he laid eyes on Mercedes he never, ever touched another dame. And he never touched your mother.”